NASA has made an exciting new discovery on Mars. The Perseverance rover recently recorded evidence of a weather phenomenon that had long been thought to exist but had never been observed before: electrical discharges raging beneath the dust storms that sweep across the surface of Mars. These storms are also known as “dust devils.”
This phenomenon, described in a recent study in the journal Nature, is evidence that electrical discharges do occur in the Martian atmosphere. Dust devils are a common feature of the Martian landscape. As on Earth, dust devils on Mars are formed by the rapid rise of warm air currents heated by proximity to the surface.
It was believed that dust on the surface of Mars caught up in this vortex would generate static electricity through friction. This is the same effect you feel when you get a slight electric shock when walking across the floor in socks and touching a door handle.
“Atmospheric conditions on Mars make it easier to observe this phenomenon, since much less charge is required for electrical sparks to occur than in the boundary layer of Earth’s atmosphere,” said lead author Baptiste Chide, a scientist with the Perseverance rover team from the French research institute L’Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, in a NASA statement about the study.
Incredible luck after disappointment
The fact that lightning on Mars had long eluded detection was a real disappointment for scientists studying the Red Planet. After all, electrical discharges had already been confirmed on other planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn, which are much further away and are not explored by robots from as close a distance as Mars.
This discovery was made possible by incredible luck. It was made using the microphone of the SuperCam instrument aboard the Perseverance rover, which is designed to analyze the acoustic properties of Martian rocks.
Since the start of its mission in 2021, Perseverance has recorded 55 sounds of electrical discharges in the Martian atmosphere. Some of them were recorded during dust devils passing directly over the rover. Since the number of discharges did not increase during global dust storms on the planet, scientists concluded that dust devils visited the rover more often than expected — fortunately for the mission.
Confirmation of the existence of triboelectric charges on the Red Planet is extremely interesting, because electrical discharges can cause unique chemical reactions, some of which can affect the chemical balance of the surface and even increase the chances of forming complex compounds or organic molecules.
Earlier, we reported on how one dust devil ate another on Mars.
According to NASA
